And then she asked for a job. She's got me dead to rights though. Whenever people ask me about my influences, I'm like, Hummel figurines, baby photos, certain gems, cute kitten calendars. "Hang In There Baby!" It's probably my preciousness that causes my enduring affection for the recent bumper crop of Swedish indie pop, which is uniformly whimsical and fey (the Knife, while incredible, is obviously excluded from this taxonomy), that has flooded the States over the past couple of years. We could start by talking about Abba, but on his deathbed, my esteemed mentor in preciousness (a certain gray eminance called Chauncy Wigglesbottom), clutching my ruffled sleeve with a daintily manicured hand, said to me, "Brian, never write about Abba!" And I gave him my oath. We could talk about Camera Obscura, but they aren't really Swede-poppers due to the minor technicality of being Scottish. We could talk about Jens Lekman or Pelle Carlberg, but their mannered affectations leave me a little cold. We could also start with Acid House Kings or the Cardigans, who laid a lot of the groundwork for this new wave of Swede pop - actually, we could definitely talk about AHK's frankly terrifying cover photo (notice how the eyes just follow you. Do they have Olan Mills in Sweden? Is it haunted?) but we've only got so much bandwidth here and I'd rather share the newer stuff with you.

The Concretes' Victoria Bergsman makes a terrific cameo in Peter Bjorn and John's conversation song "Young Folks", which is pretty perfect comfort pop - the whistled melody tattoos itself on your brain immediately, and the song does a great job of capturing the bubble-like quality of burgeoning romance (it makes me think of getting-to-know-you montages in movies: Throwing a medicine ball, chasing pigeons in the park, eating ice cream in front of a boardwalk arcade...). There's a really adorable video for "Young Folks" here, sort of like Linklater without the drugs and paranoia.

In my Pitchfork review of Loney, Dear's Sub Pop debut, I speculated that Death Cab for Cutie's Ben Gibbard and Belle & Sebastian's Stuart Murdoch collaboratively authored Sweden's English curriculum, explaining why so many Swedes get starry eyed when they sing in English. As one savvy reader pointed out, this isn't actually true - the jig is up, and I salute this reader's fine-tuned bullshit detector. At any rate, Loney Dear is an utterly likeable musician with a voice that seems to be composed of some sort of chilled liquid, and his record is my current go-to record for frazzled moments.

I wonder if this same reader wrote to I'm From Barcelona to inform them that they aren't, in fact, from Barcelona, and I wonder if they replied that it just sounds better than I'm From Jonkoping (umlauts sold seperately). IFB is a bouncy, jangly behemoth-- there are like 67 people in the band ("hey, I've got a kazoo and a neckbeard" - it's that kind of party), a utopian society where cute girls sing rapturous 20-voice harmonies with heinous boys and every day is school picture day. From personal research I've discovered that taking any "ba-ba-ba" section from an I'm From Barcelona song and using digital editing software to crank the speed and pitch way down turns it into a monkish chant. You should try it - it's fun, and Audacity is free! Sorry to say that I've run out of posting time before getting to The Legends and Hello Saferide (except to those of you who become personally offended when I write things, to whom I say, you're welcome), but if people want to hear more modern Swede pop or discuss it with greater depth, we could do that in the future - there's plenty of this stuff I haven't even touched on. You know your way to the comments box. Moistworks is nothing if not interactive. Until then, have a precious day!